When I was 15, I was a deeply unattractive specimen. I featured most of my current drawbacks – the arrogance, the lack of height, the fact that without serious gym work, my body tends towards the Tony Hancock look more than the Daniel Craig look – but without the positives that have come with age, wisdom, wealth and Internet celebrity.

[yes, quite.]

But I was also friends at school with a fair number of young gentlemen who weren’t relying on “maybe at sixth form, liking the Smiths will impress some girls” for their romantic lives. Rather, they had Pretty Girlfriends, and recounted their Mostly Made Up Tales Of Sexual Awesomeness for the delectation of us lesser beings.

And in either case – whether it was one of the boys of my caste, or one of the boys of the “has actually put his finger in a girl’s parts” caste – if we’d scored with a reasonably attractive lady in her 30s, that would have been a SUPERDOUBLETURBOMEGAWIN. Kudos would have been given, right up until the end of time.

So I find cases like this one deeply curious. OK, 15-year-old boys are actually pretty revolting specimens; 15-year-old girls only score with them on the grounds that they’re mildly preferable to creepy paedos, and everyone grown-up is embarrassed by the fact that they were once one, or that they scored with one on the grounds above. So a 30something lady fancying 15-year-old boys is a bit weird.

But hell. If we’re going to have any kind of harm-based justice system, which I’m assuming is roughly what a justice system should be (I know that the War On Some Drugs is a counterexample, but even that has a vague deterrent philosophy that “if people are thrown in jail for choosing what to do to their bodies, it’ll deter them from putting stuff in their bodies which turns them into mad granny-robbing loonies”), then how on earth does nicking someone just for having the insanely niche taste of “spotty boys who don’t really know what they’re doing” fit? They’re delighted; their mates are amused and jealous; and nobody else in their right mind gives a fuck.

In short – 15-year-old JB getting some action from a medium-attractive 30something Asian babe – hell yeah. On the other hand, if the woman in question would have gone to jail for the action she gave me, then I’d have been pretty distraught. At 15, everything feels like your own fault; indeed, the main thing you haven’t mastered at that age is “realising that the world is way beyond you, and that you don’t really matter all that much”.

So what we have here is the law taking something odd but harmless, and turning it into something which not only ruins the life of the woman concerned and her kids, but that will also shroud the boys involved in a cloud of depression and guilt forever.

And even Bystander, who isn’t usually an idiot, has fallen from the We Must Destroy The Children In Order To Protect Them bullshit on this one, and thinks that jailing the woman in question is fair play. All very odd. Given that your average 15-year-old boy would fuck the crack of dawn if it had hairs on it, a (bizarrely) willing older lady seems like a reasonable induction, all things considered.